Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Hey, It's National Preparedness Month! (NPM) – September 2012

I know I shouldn't poke fun at the timing. It's been Sept for 4 years and Hurricane Season.

Interesting Partnerships lately.

Stay Alert.
Stay Informed.
Stay Involved.

-MP

National Preparedness Month (NPM) – September 2012

By Phil Burns - Sun Sep 02, 4:32 pm - APN

For
the last four years, September has been designated National
Preparedness Month. We’ve generally recognized this tribute each year
but this year we’re going to try to take it to another level!
Many Preppers I talk to have no idea that FEMA has very extensive disaster preparedness information and plans on their Ready.Gov site.
How many of you, right now, are thinking “You’re doing WHAT with
FEMA!?”? Yeah, let’s get that one out-of-the-way right from the start!
The fact that they have all this information and that they strongly recommend everyone be prepared flies strongly in the face of the DHS declaration that essentially says Preppers are potential threats.
So how can FEMA be telling us to get Prepped while DHS is calling
Preppers potential terrorists? Going carefully through their definition
document in the earlier link, we find the difference. DHS is saying “a
belief in the need to be prepared for an attack either by participating in paramilitary preparations and training or survivalism.” while FEMA is 100% about being prepared for a disaster.
To summarize this, FEMA/DHS are good with Preppers when everything
can be framed as preparing for a disaster. Where they diverge is when
you are preparing for an attack.
Here at The APN, we have our own beliefs and definitions of Preparedness:Our Core Belief

We firmly believe that every American family should
strive to become Self-Reliant, enabling them to better weather the
day-to-day disasters, catastrophes and hardships that we all experience.

Our Secondary Beliefs

We believe in Public Virtue and that communities should
draw together through Preparedness and develop friendships, trust and
loyalty within their neighborhood through discussing and developing
support, evacuation and safety measures.
We believe that every family should have a personal storage of every
needful thing in the event of a local disaster to enable them to help
themselves, help their neighbors and help their community.
We believe in the “goodness of man” and that our responsibilities lay
first to ourselves, second to our families and then to our neighbors
and communities.
We believe that with proper preparation, disasters can be overcome on a personal, family, neighborhood and community level.

Our Mission

“To bring knowledge and understanding of living a
Self-Reliant lifestyle into the mainstream and teach it to every
household in America.”

Squaring Up

So how does The APN square up with the Federal Government based on
their definitions and ours? They draw their line at “paramilitary
preparations” and being “prepared for an attack” – have we crossed it?
Being Self Reliant absolutely includes the training, ability and
preparation for defending yourself. As well, we are very strong
supporters of the Second Amendment. We do not actively promote joining a
Militia but we do not denounce it and we think it’s a good idea – if it
is the right kind of militia. We absolutely support survivalism!
Based on the government and our definitions; We are likely considered
a fringe group. In an effort to demonstrate that their definition is
extreme and ours is reasonable, we are going to virtually “partner up”
with FEMA (note that “virtually partner” means “not really”, we are not actually involved with them at all) and fully embrace and participate in National Preparedness Month.

FEMA Style Prepping
FEMA teaches an extremely basic level of preparedness – food and
water for 3 days is the maximum they recommend because by then, they
should be there helping you.
Unless they’re not.
FEMA promotes a very simple and structured approach to preparedness:

Be Informed. Make A Plan. Build A Kit. Get Involved.

They provide solid information on the basics of Disaster Preparedness
with specific Preps for every type of disaster. These include what to
do Before a specific Disaster and separate information on what to do During a specific Disaster. They also include what to do afterwards for certain Disasters.

APN and National Preparedness Month
FEMA’s information is solid, it’s great – it’s also simple and
short-sighted. In seeking a simple and structured solution, they have
completely overlooked teaching self-reliance. In fact, their model
expects you to NOT be self-reliant. They want you to prepare to live
until they get to you. We want you to prepare so that when/if they get
to you, you say no-thanks and send them away. Preppers do not belong in
shelters. We belong in our homes if we’re bugging in or in out BOL if
we’re bugging out. We do not rely on nor do we need FEMA or anyone else
to come rescue us and take care of us.
To participate in National Preparedness Month (NPM) The American
Preppers Network is going to take the baseline that FEMA has developed
for Government Disaster Preparedness and turn it all into Prepper
Disaster Preparedness! We’re going to add to everything they’ve done
and turn it all into something useful for Preppers. Our goal is to
publish at least one Prepper Disaster Preparedness Plan each day.
We know that these will be overly basic for a lot of you, but we have
a LOT of new Preppers who are begging for basic info including what to
do and how to get started. At the end of the month we’ll take all these
articles and put them into a pdf that will be a free download for
everybody. It should make quite a Getting Started doc!

As we publish these, we ask your assistance in reviewing them – if
you see anything we left out or overlooked, please let us know in the
comments and we’ll update the documents.